I might be barking up the wrong tree as I don’t know really what I’m looking at… but why does the 18-105 get a better Peak Score than the 16-85 that seems to have better individual scores & is worth twice as much..?
..or have I miss read something ??? or just screwed up, I am a noob.. ???

You're paying for more than just numbers on a scale. For example the 18-105 is all plastic including the lens mount. But if it helps you noobies, Ken R. says the 16-85 is a much better lens. And we all know how you noobs like to listen to Ken :^)

Nobby66 said:
but why does the 18-105 get a better Peak Score than the 16-85 that seems to have better individual scores

Reading through the DXO testing parameters & the methods by which they came up with their ratings, the peak score is just that, the absolute single best result from the multitudes of tested aperture/focal length combinations, whereas the individual scores are the average of the scores obtained at various focal length/aperture combinations. It is feasible that one lens could have a "sweet spot" whose absolute performance at a single aperture/focal length is better than another lens that whose performance averaged across many combinations is better.

Finally I bought the 16-85mm a few months ago and after weeks of experimenting with it I can tell that I'm not too impressed with the lens in relation to the 18-105 mm which I used before. In any case, the AF is working better (faster), but in the sharpness I didn’t noticed a big improvement. Anyway, I continued to use it, because 2 mm in wide range in my daily use means to me a lot more then 20 mm at the end. To summarize, whether it is worth to pay more for 16-85 then 18-105?.. I would say yes, even I’m not fully satisfied and probably I’ll very soon look further and bay some better lenses…

Is the 16-85vr sharper than the 18-105? My copy (sold alrdy) was not. At 16mm the corners are pretty bad and i'm not talking about vignetting here, I don't think it's a very meaningful advantage. The 16-85 has a decent build quality, the zoom ring feels nicely damped, the barrel is made of metal, also it has a much speedier and quieter af motor, + metal lens mount. (still slow af compared to for example the 50mm 1.8g)
Worth mentioning that the 16-85 is horrible against bright light, even if the sun is not even close to the frame. Contrast drops tremendously when you have like 1/3 semi bright (blue:S)Sky in your picture. On top of all that it can have horrible lens flare with annoying purple cast and ugly shapes. VR2 is nice in low light, but on my copy I felt it kept blurring my shots in good lighting conditions. (shot @ 1/80 to 1/200)

Really other than the focal range I don't think there is much to gain by buying different "kit"/variable aperture lenses. If you really want to see a difference in performance or sharpness you have to step up to a fixed aperture lens...whether it be a prime or zoom. Especially if you were looking for lots of sharpness gain from the 16-85 compared to the 18-105 as the 18-105 is one of the sharper kit lenses. There isn't much point to it. If a person already had the 18-105 you are better off getting the 10-24, 12-24 or another wide angle lens to compliment it instead of adding 2mm on the wide end and losing mm on the telephoto end in just about every case.

Also from what I can tell the 16-85 isn't that great at 16, so there is even less to gain. The wide angle zooms are very good at 16, which makes more sense to me.

>> Now if Nikon would make a 16 2,8 DX prime the 16-85 would not get a lot of use. <<

What's wrong with an FX Prime then ?

16mm is not that wide on DX anyways, i guess you can always also switch to a Tokina AT X 116 PRO DX if you want a fast 16mm 2.8, which is a very very good lens..., and a very nice complement for your 16-85 ....